Dec. 13, 2008
12:44 p.m.
Adam Olsen writes:
I could easily spend half an hour trying random permutations of a pattern before I figure out why the original didn't work... and I've had a moderate amount of experience.
It takes a moderate amount of experience to get that far, though. In particular, in this case, all you need to understand is "[abc]" matches any of the characters "a", "b", or "c", and *that* is familiar to anybody who has used a decent shell (any Unix shell, and I believe 4DOS and friends provided it too but I haven't used them for 20 years). So I don't think that lack of diagnostics explains widespread reluctance to even substitute ".*" for "*", but instead propose something as ugly as .split(list("abc")).